The Collection

Ok, so just a couple of words about the collection.  

Basically in short, it's a collection of Beer Glasses, (with me so far?) into which I will add any drinking vessel as long as it satisfies these three conditions: 

• It is a vessel for drinking beer. No whisky glasses, no pop glasses and no wine glasses. I’ll accept that it could be argued that glass boots and yards of ale are drinking vessels but they just don’t do it for me, (at the moment!)
• It is made of glass. No ceramic mugs, no pewter tankards and no plastic glasses! (Ugh!)
• It has printed, engraved, marked, etched, drawn, labelled or stamped somewhere on it the mark of either a beer brand or brewery. No glasses with “Granny’s favourite pint” on them, no “Newton & Ridley” glasses and no “Souvenir of Costa del Sol” on them.

The only other stipulation I put on myself is how I obtain the glasses. I don’t really see the point in deciding to collect something and then gather the items simply by buying them. I could increase my collection 100 fold almost overnight by buying up every auction on eBay and or sending begging letters to breweries for either freebies or offering to purchase glasses. Somehow the “hunt” of tracking down locations and venues at which one might find a suitable glass is all the more satisfying. For me that means you can find me scouring the shelves of the local charity shops several times a week or loitering around the car boot sales in the area. OK, not much of a “hunt” but it seems more honourable to me! 

Probably the most unfortunate factor of collecting beer glasses is that the items themselves do take up a fair amount of space. A stamp collector can store hundreds of stamps in a single album but for the poor beer glass collector a hundred glasses take up serious shelf space. There’s no easy answer to this and although I have surreptitiously taken over several shelves in various display cabinets in our home I am still left with boxes of glasses in the loft. Still all is not all lost, I guess the kids will have to leave home some day and then all that bedroom space will be mine, all mine, all mine!